Colias hyale, the pale clouded yellow, is a butterfly of the family Pieridae, that is, the yellows and whites, which is found in most of Europe and large parts of Asia. It is a migrant to the British Isles and Scandinavia. The adult wingspan is 52–62 millimetres (2.0–2.4 in).


Male

Female

Illustration from John Curtis's British Entomology Volume 5
Description

The upperside of the male is more or less light lemon-yellow, with the black marginal and submarginal bands more or less complete on both wings; the black middle spot of the forewing large, in centre of hindwing an orange-yellow double spot; base of wings more or less dusted with black. The underside is bright yellow, being somewhat lighter on the forewing, with small marginal and larger submarginal red-brown spots; the middle spot of the forewing black with pale centre, the hindwing bearing a double spot which is mother-of-pearl colour, encircled by a double ring of red-brown; fringes above and beneath, as well as head and antenna red-brown. In the female the ground-colour of the upperside and the proximal area of the underside of the forewing is white, being slightly yellowish.

The egg is bottle-shaped, whitish, with yellowish brown stripes. The larva is bluish green or grass-green, velvety, there being on the back two rows of blackish dots which are traversed by two thin yellow longitudinal lines, above the legs a yellow or reddish longitudinal side-line, head dark green; the autumnal larvae without black dorsal spots.Pupa green, with yellow lateral lines.

Biology

The larva feeds on Vicia cracca, Fabaceae, Vicia, Coronilla, Medicago, Lotus, Cytisus, Trifolium

Habitat

Flower meadows up to 2,000 metres above sea level.

Subspecies

Colias hyale hyale Europe, Ukraine, S. Russia
Colias hyale alta Staudinger, 1886 a large form with a broad black marginal band provisionally accepted as a full species that flies only at high altitudes in Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan "but it may only be a subspecies of C. hyale".
by Grieshuber & Lamas, 2007

Colias hyale altaica Verity, 1911 Altaï
Colias hyale irkutskana Stauder, 1924
Colias hyale palidis Fruhstorfer, 1910 East Siberia
Colias hyale novasinensis Reissinger, 1989 Gansu
^ Josef Grieshuber & Gerardo Lamas (2007). "A synonymic list of the genus Colias Fabricius, 1807 (Lepidoptera: Pieridae)" (PDF). Mitteilungen der Münchner Entomologischen Gesellschaft. 97: 131–171.

source - Wikipedia